What buyers ask AI before choosing a real estate developer

Buyers ask whether the project is RERA registered, whether the builder hands over on time, and what the flat costs once every charge is added. Clubhouse and landscaping questions come near the end, long after the shortlist is fixed.

The questions, in the words buyers use

Is it legal and approved

• "How do I check if a project is RERA registered"
• "What is the difference between a commencement certificate and an occupancy certificate"
• "Is the land title clear, how do I verify it"
• "Should I buy before the occupancy certificate is received"

Will it actually be delivered

• "Which builders in this city have a record of delays"
• "What happens to my money if construction stops"
• "Possession delayed, can I claim interest or exit"
• "Does the escrow rule protect my payments"

What does it really cost

• "All in cost of a 2BHK including stamp duty and registration"
• "What is floor rise and preferential location charge"
• "GST on an under construction flat versus a ready one"
• "How much is monthly maintenance and who decides it"

Loan, tax and paperwork

• "Is this project approved by banks for a home loan"
• "Documents needed for registration in this state"
• "TDS when buying property, when does it apply"
• "Buying as an NRI, can I do it on power of attorney"

What a good answer looks like

For the legal questions, your page should not only give your registration number but explain how the reader can check it themselves on the authority's portal. Inviting the check is what makes the number believable.

For delivery, a table of your completed projects with promised and actual handover dates. If some were late, say so and say why. A builder who explains one delay honestly is read very differently from one who says nothing.

For cost, a worked example: a flat of a stated size, with each charge listed by name, and the date the sheet was prepared. Do not publish an average price per square foot you have not measured.

For the NRI questions, one page on power of attorney, remittance, joint ownership and the tax deduction rules. It is a small amount of writing and very little of it exists on builder websites.

Where you are probably missing

• The RERA number is an image, not text, so it does not exist for a crawler.
• No completed projects list with dates, which leaves your best argument unmade.
• Everything important is inside a brochure PDF that sits behind a form.
• One page for many projects, so no page answers a question about a specific one.
• No answer to the delay question, the one question every buyer asks.
• Nothing about what happens after possession: defect liability, society formation, handover of common areas.

What to publish first

• One page per live project, with the RERA registration in text and the approval status.
• Completed projects with promised and actual handover dates.
• A full cost sheet with a date and a worked example.
• A page on defect liability and what you fix after handover.
• A page for NRI buyers covering paperwork, remittance and tax deduction.

Those five pages answer most of the question list above. They are also the five pages your sales team already explains on the phone every day, which means the material exists and only needs writing down.

A worked example of a cost answer

Buyers ask what a flat really costs. Here is what a complete answer contains, in order, for one configuration in one project: the carpet area as defined by the Act, the base rate per square foot, the floor rise if any, the preferential location charge if any, covered or open parking, club or amenity charges, infrastructure and development charges, the electricity and water connection deposits, the advance maintenance and the corpus contribution, stamp duty at the rate applicable in your state, registration charges, and goods and services tax where the flat is still under construction.

List each one by name with its own figure, total it, and write the date the sheet was prepared. Then add one line saying what is not included, for example interiors, a loan processing fee, or the society transfer charge on resale.

A buyer can compare that sheet against another builder's sheet. They cannot compare two starting prices, which is why the starting price alone never wins the question.

What these questions do not include

They do not include design and amenities in any serious way. Buyers do look at layouts and clubhouses, but almost always after the shortlist is fixed by the legal, delivery and cost questions, so pages built around amenities arrive too late to affect the decision.

They also do not include anything you cannot substantiate. An assistant will not repeat a rental yield or an appreciation forecast, and publishing one makes the checkable parts of your page look less reliable. If you want to write about investment, write about the mechanics: how rent is fixed in that area, what the society charges, what the tax treatment of rental income is.

Common questions

Which of these questions should we answer first?

The delivery one, because it is the only question where your answer cannot be copied by a competitor. Registration and cost pages are necessary and every builder can write them. A handover record with real dates is yours alone.

Is it safe to publish a full cost sheet when prices change?

Yes, with a date and a line saying rates are revised periodically. Buyers understand that. What they do not forgive is discovering three charges at the booking stage that nobody mentioned.

Our buyers are mostly non resident Indians. What changes?

The paperwork questions become the main ones: power of attorney, who can sign, how funds are remitted, which account the payment must come from, tax deducted at source, and how possession is taken without travelling. Very few builder websites answer any of this, so the gap is wide and easy to fill.

Do we need a page for a project that is already sold out?

Keep it, and convert it into a delivered project page with the handover date and what residents live with now. Those pages carry your record, and your record is what the next buyer is checking.

How soon after publishing will an assistant use these pages?

It varies and nobody controls it. Pages that state a checkable fact tend to be picked up sooner than pages of description, and pages linked from a portal listing or a news item sooner still. Treat it as weeks rather than days, and measure rather than guess.

What to do first

Pick your last delivered project and write its handover page today, with the real dates. It is the shortest page on the list and the one that answers the question buyers care about most.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.